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Tiny impacts of tiny paws upon Johnathan's tail stirred him from his slumber. Tiny voices lowered to a conspiratorial whisper tickled his ears and the words brought a familiar blend of exasperation and amusement into his slowly waking thoughts.

"Blue was better."

"Uh-uh, purple is prettier."

John slowly cracked one eyelid, staring down the length of his body towards the whispers of his son and daughter. They were partially obscured by the coil of Lily's tail thrown over his belly, but he could see well enough to make out the paw-prints of purple paint scattered up and down the scarlet scales of his tail and haunches. The two children were in the process of repeating the pattern on their mother. The garish paint clashed horribly with Lily's green hide, and John had to stifle a laugh to avoid alerting them.

Closing his eye again, he was tempted to try and go back to sleep and let the two play their game. That temptation was removed by the feeling of Lily's tongue tickling the back of his ears. "It seems the children are up." A sudden giggling followed immediately after her statement.

"Mom, we made you and dad pretty!" This time John couldn't suppress his laughter and slowly pushed himself upright. His son was squatting down on the top of Lily's thigh, trying to balance as she began to shift. His daughter was crouched in the space between Lily's belly and John's back, still in the process of painting her mother's feet.

Two beautiful melds of their mother and father.

Laurelie was a miniature slender copy of her mother, covered predominantly with the same emerald green scales, interrupted occasionally with poorly defined tiger stripes of red. At birth the red scales had been amorphous patches, but it seemed that as she grew they became more refined. She had John's steely blue-gray eyes though.

While John had gotten to name their daughter, Lily had named their son. Banzhrakin, or Ban as John called him, was named in honor of Lily's brother. Like his sister, he had inherited the same glossy green scales over much of his body. He had taken a little bit more of his father's red though. Plated scales of cardinal red covered his throat, chest, belly, and the webs of his wings. He was bulkier than his sister. Even now at only a few years old it was apparent that he would become quite the powerful adult.

Both of them were surprisingly small, not even the size of an adult human. John couldn't believe how small they had been at birth. After nearly two years of pregnancy, Lily still had only barely showed any extra size, and when she had informed him that it was time, she had suffered no difficulty birthing the two mewling wyrmlings. It would take decades before they were anywhere near the size of their parents.

"Look at you two!" Lily chided as she rose to her feet, sending Ban tumbling to the cushions of their bed. "Such a mess! I think a bath is in order." Both children squealed in mock terror and attempted to bolt at the threat of a bath, but not fast enough. Lily seized Ban carefully in her jaws while John trapped Laurelie with his tail before sweeping her up onto his back.

Despite their fidgeting and pleading, they were given no reprieve as they were carried to Lily's enormous bathing pool. Lily unceremoniously dropped Ban into the bath, and rather than suffer the same fate Laurelie jumped in herself. Both of them were immediately surrounded by a cloud of purple paint as they paddled around the shallow water. John and Lily slipped in after them and attempted to remove the numerous paw-prints from one another.

"What do you want for breakfast this morning children?"

"Melons!"

"Eggs!"

"Cheese!"

"Sausage!"

The two of them continued calling out additions to their banquet as they splashed each other.

"Well you'd better stop playing and start washing, or you won't be eating anything." John's threat had the immediate effect of sending them racing to the side of the pool for soap.

John chuckled and lounged back against his wife. Lily hummed and leaned in to nibble at his cheeks. "We're going to have to ask Maribel to watch them again soon I think." Lily's voice was husky as she whispered to him. "I've been feeling an itch for some quality time."

John closed his eyes and rubbed his face against Lily's. It had taken a while to get used to intimacy without the use of his forelimbs; they lacked the range and flexibility of human arms. "I talked to the foreman last week," John mumbled back, "he said that the new home should be done before the end of winter. Then they'll have their own room."

"That will be nice. We should have started construction earlier. Six years is too long for them to stay in the same bed as us."

"Mmm. We'll have plenty of time to make up for it." He replied, flicking his tongue across her lips.

A sudden gout of water stunned them both, "Ewwww!" Ban declared forcefully at their kissing and smacked tail across the water to splash them again.

Lily grumbled playfully and plunged one wing down into the water like a wedge, sending a tidal wave toward the wide-eyed youngster. Ban tumbled in the water as the current carried him into the center of the pool before coming up spluttering and spitting soapy water. John had been surprised at the buoyancy of young dragons.

"Okay, I think bath time is over." John scooped his son out of the water before the splash fight could escalate any further. Laurelie scrambled out herself, teasing her brother about getting dunked.

She was abruptly silenced as John dropped a massive towel over her head. "Hey!"

"Hurry up and dry off, your mother and I are going outside to get some sun."

In their unaltered forms the two adults were simply too large for a towel to be practical.

The air outside sent a chilly shiver down John's spine. Winter on the Blazing coast was not the harsh snow-packed season of his homeland, but it was still cold enough to be uncomfortable on wet scales. He settled in alongside Lily as the weak winter sun beamed down at them, slowly warming them to more tolerable levels.

"Another letter from your parents arrived. They want to know when they can see their grandchildren." Lily spoke quietly, nuzzling against him once more now that they had some peace.

John sighed, "I know we should make the trip over there, but I just..." he trailed off, and finished with a shrug. "It's just going to be so awkward."

Shortly after coming back to Lily, the emerald dragoness sent an official delegation to John's homeland. They carried a small crate of exquisitely polished pearls and a larger crate of silks and spices to be sold or bartered as reparation for the damage that John had caused in his escape. After much negotiation John was cleared of the charges related to demon summoning and given permission to return under supervision.

In addition, the delegation had carried private letters to John's family. He had explained in his letter how he had been bespelled into the body of a dragon and had taken up as consort to Lily. For a long time no correspondence came back. Just days after Lily had given birth, a letter finally arrived by ship. It made it clear that although John's departure had caused hardship in the family business, John was still a part of the family.

Regular exchanges had filled the time since then, and once his parents had learned that they were grandparents, they had been insistent on him returning, at least temporarily.

"Love, you are not going to use that as an excuse. It's been almost a decade since you've been home. Things are stable enough here that I can afford to leave with you, but that won't always be the case. We should go. It will be late summer there, we can stay until the end of the season, and when we come back our home will be finished."

With a resigned grumble John nodded, "All right, all right. How long will it take you to get the transport prepared?" It had taken John months to fly a land route from his homeland to the Blazing Coast. A ship would take nearly a month to make the nearest port and another week of flight overland. It was safer and faster for Lily to prepare a transport circle.

"I can have it ready by the end of the week."

John nodded. "I'll slip a letter back to them."

Thorough experimentation had proven beyond a doubt that Johnathan's transformation was complete and permanent. He was a dragon, and had been gifted a dragon's increased capacity to alter the reality of the world around him. Lily had been training him to harness the ability, but John was a long way from being able to conduct the delicate preparations for a total transport of living creatures. He was however, capable of sending very small objects mostly intact across nearly any distance.

"Good. I have to admit, I'm looking forward to seeing more of your home than a room in the cellar of the palace."

John smirked despite himself and draped one wing across Lily's back. "You're going to have to shift both of our sized down too love. There's not a building in the whole region large enough to house two adult dragons."

"What barbarians!" Lily teased. "What sort of uncivilized country has no dragons?"

"Only the most horrid of places. Let's not go there."

"Oh no, we must! We must bring them the enlightenment of our most majestic selves."

John rolled his eyes, "Ok, that's enough of that."

"What, you don't think I'm majestic?"

John twisted, pushing the larger dragoness onto her back and rolling atop her so that he straddled her and looked down into her eyes. "Mountains are majestic, the sea is majestic. Beautiful, clever, brilliant, exotic? Those are all words I would use to describe you. I'm afraid I can't include majestic though."

"Well, you're silly. A silly fool that can't recognize that a dragon is far more majestic than simple mountains. Mountains! Just a bunch of rocks."

"Maybe, but I'm your silly fool. You're stuck with me."

Lily sniffed. "I suppose I'll live."

John smiled and bent down to touch his nose to hers, breathing in her breath.

"Are you wrestling again?"

The excited question darted through the air just moments ahead of Laurelie. The youngling scampered across the stone of the overlook to clamber up John's back, followed shortly by her brother.

"Dad's winning!"

A flutter of mortifying memories froze John in place. Memories of one of their desperate attempts at intimacy when the two of them thought the children were asleep. They had been caught in a reverse position, on the very same overlook, with Lily straddling John in a very compromising fashion. Only the vast cover of their wings and the lame excuse of wrestling had saved them from truly difficult questions.

"No dear one, your father was just telling me how majestic I look."

"What's `Jestic?"

"Dragons are majestic of course. Now hurry down, I'm sure Maribel has breakfast set up already."

Still chattering, Ban and Laurelie hopped from the heights of John's back. They were too young yet for proper flight, but they spread their wings in a long glide that took them all the way to the stairs of the overlook.

"Another year I think before we'll have to take them up. I was eight years old when my parents taught me, but they've been learning faster than I did."

The thought of taking the two children up into the sky made John's heart clench with worry, but he knew it was inevitable. It would be a terrible shame for him to rob his own children of the joy that was flying.

Reluctantly, John rolled away from the warmth of Lily's body and stood. "I guess we better get some breakfast. We both have things to do if we're going to make the trip."

"Don't look so glum about it. Trust me; things are going to be fine."